Computing devices, such as a personal computer, typically employ a folder/document metaphor for storing and organizing content. While such a metaphor is well suited to an office environment, where content is typically in the form of documents, it is not effective when applied to the use and management of arbitrary digital content. For example, a digital photo album may be defined to correspond to a physical photo album. Thus, certain photos and/or textures may be identified as corresponding to front and back covers for the photo album, and other photos identified as being internal to the album. All content within the album would be stored in a folder or hierarchy of folders. Unfortunately, such a hierarchy lacks cohesion or inherent structure found in a physical photo album. Thus, while a real photo album can be easily organized, shared, etc., there is no standard method for doing so with the hierarchy for the digital photo album.
One solution has been to apply an encapsulating structure (e.g. zip or tar file) to the hierarchy and thus create an archive containing all of the digital content. This archive can then be exchanged, sold, etc. A significant drawback to such an archive is that it is monolithic, e.g., it contains all data within the album. This reduces the transferability of the album, and restricts selective transfer of only some album contents. In addition, an archive generally lacks data describing the context and contents of the photo album (e.g., meta-data), thus making it difficult to organize and search/find digital content, and to avoid having duplicative digital content. For example, once the archive it received, it needs to be re-created in a folder structure corresponding to the original hierarchy structure, or risk internal references to files being lost. This prevents or restricts moving, organizing, and re-organizing digital content.
In addition, assuming the user can maintain the proper structure of the content, also lacking to such an archive is an easy, robust, and widely-supported method for searching digital content. For example, for music data, without excessive redundancy, folder organization techniques cannot help if you want to locate a song played based on multiple criteria, such as mood and music type, since music would generally fall into multiple categories and thus require entry in multiple folders.
Similarly, one cannot select a video starring a certain actor and start viewing at a particular scene, hum a bar of a tune and have the system find it for you, or find all photos taken at an event last year. These tasks cannot be performed because mere hierarchical storage of digital content lacks associative or context data, such as captions, dates, places, copyrights, artist, author, genre, etc. to allow identification of digital content based on such search criteria.
Assuming the digital content can be located, exchanging the digital content is difficult due to a lack of open and flexible standard to do so. Existing digital content packaging schemes are proprietary and tailored to specific content types, such as for electronic books or music. Currently there is no technology for uniformly packaging, in electronic form, a wide variety of digital content in a way that qualifies the content as what the entertainment industry calls a “title.”